


verdant

by clytemnestras



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Gen, community: multi_genfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-20
Updated: 2016-06-20
Packaged: 2018-07-16 06:18:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7255885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clytemnestras/pseuds/clytemnestras
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She wakes up and flicks the cabin lights on, a slow crawl of light shuddering out towards the darkness and everything, even the stars, still obscured through the glass.</p>
            </blockquote>





	verdant

**Author's Note:**

  * For [happyg_rl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/happyg_rl/gifts).



> remember when tfa came out and there were all those ~uwu plant mom rey~ posts? 
> 
> well.....

There is an ecosystem to the space she’s carved out for herself, a mechanical world inside a rippled sheet of desert stretched out across the bigger world, soft but tempestuous and ready to swallow. Cleaned-out food cartons line the edges of each window, foster-homes for sprawling greenery. Yellowing tufts of grass and thorny plant-stems always line the sand plains. Sometimes they need a little help. 

It’s not easy to be alone in the desert.

The scrapheap is a home to lots of things, everything that learns to thrive in the heat, or can be adapted otherwise. A blown-out motor, some hypertensile rope and a pulley system make cultivation easy; fifteen plants that twine up against the windscreen, turned toward the hot sun and drinking it down like nectar.

Sometimes Rey will wake up with the sun spilling through the windshield feeling something like momentum in her veins, thrumming under the surface. She will wake with a wrench in her hand, never having made it to bed and her whole soul shaking like an engine thrum. 

Today she wakes up in the dark, gooseflesh sprung all across her arms and drums against her skull, louder than anything, unsynced but calling towards her heartbeat. She wakes up and flicks the cabin lights on, a slow crawl of light shuddering out towards the darkness and everything, even the stars, still obscured through the glass. The pounding is all around her, water pressing against the dome and running down in waves and she hasn’t seen anything like this since she was a half-formed thought, a child clinging to the fingers of whatever market baron was feeling kind.

It’s  _ raining. _

The engine of her soul  _ sings  _ with it, catching on the drums and it’s so easy for Rey to leap from her chair and wrap herself in fabric, nothing of her skin uncovered but her eyes. Goggles will be useless in this weather. She could hardly care less. She grabs her market bag and opens the airlock, water soaking through each carefully layered twist of clothing and onto skin. She shivers with it, elation run through to her nerves. When she was young, the planet-natives who still knew of the old religion would gather all the orphaned children and tell them of the rain; old gods - or new ones - that passed through the universe and looked down upon the starving, thirsting children in desertlands and opened their palms down upon them, a dramatic answer to every half-though prayer. Now she understands it better as a science and inevitability. A plant’s got to drink, as do girls, and the reserves beneath the dust must be replenished somehow. 

But even with that knowledge there’s an undeniable magic to this - the way the tiny dotted stars light up the drops of rain like they’re of the same materials, just thrown light-years apart, the way it spatters against her, bouncing off her arm and cutting through the air when she moves like she might control it. Rey spins in place, arms spread, laughing; nothing could be closer to joy than this. As she takes steps on the sand her footprints fill and overflow with water.

Something about it strikes her.

She digs in her satchel for something - another empty food tin, ready to be refilled, but for now with another purpose. She lays it in the sand and listens to the  _ thump thump thump  _ as water fills it near instantly. There will be no rationing water between herself and the flora this month, a glorious plenty to go around. 

She searches her bag for anything else that she could fill up and lays her finds behind her in a trail through the wet sand. Rey tilts her head up toward the sky. Raindrops touch her tongue, cold and slightly acidic. The moment feels charged with miracles, childish hope swimming up to the surface. If the rain can return, even only for a few minutes, so could anything. 

  
Rey watches the first orange line of dawn burn through the thin cloud and feels sure that the future will be fertile with joy. 


End file.
